Meditations for a New Century

Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar. This is a writer you want to spend hour upon hour with, reveling in the cadences of her prose, marveling at her ability to glean wisdom from her present and her past, and from the writers before her who have similarly contemplated the intensity of human suffering and joy, delight and pain.

-Sudip Bose, Interim Editor, The American Scholar

Lucy Ferriss's meditations reveal an agile and curious mind at play, as one thought leads effortlessly to another. She can leap from a single musical note to ideas about mediocrity, code-switching, funambulism, and the Quakers, choreographing it all into a coherent and luminous whole.

-Carolyn Kuebler, Editor, New England Review

When Fourth Genre received "Bush" by Lucy Ferriss, we thought it a startling example of the kind of essay we were always on the lookout for-an essay that combines cultural observation with personal revelation. "Bush" probes its subject, poking here and there, turning it on its side this way and that, to catch, in James Merrill's words, "a steadily more revealing light." "Bush" negotiates a contemporary "depilatory dilemma" with stylistic deftness of touch and elegant concision. Unlike a scholarly piece on the social custom of the Brazilian bikini wax that might reach a firm ideological and moralistic conclusion, "Bush" raises questions and sees where they go. And that's wherein its beauty lies.

-Marcia Aldrich, author of Girl Rearing and Companion to an Untold Story

These splendid wide-ranging essays are filled with moments of hard-earned wisdom and deep realization; with each of Lucy Ferris's experiences, I found myself admiring the thoughts and questions from where her writing so intelligently takes us. This collection should be savored and widely read.

-Allen Gee, author of My Chinese America